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Intercom On Starting Up
With the insane volume of startup literature already out there writing this book wasn’t a no-brainer for us. No one wants to add to the scrap heap. But if you restrict yourself to only reading articles from people who have actually created a business, hit some revenue target, or broken out of the MVP-in-an-incubator stage, there’s very few books and blogs left. This is why we hope this book is relevant to you.
It’s not packed with startup clichés, nor is it steeped in myths about how huge companies got their break. Yes, Airbnb sold cereal before they were a 31 billion dollar company, and Slack was one hell of a pivot, but those wells have been over-drilled for their useful lessons at this point. This book is our honest, opinionated take on what we’ve learned building Intercom over the past 6 years. You won’t like it all, you won’t agree with it all, but you’re not supposed to. Your mileage will vary.
It’s not packed with startup clichés, nor is it steeped in myths about how huge companies got their break. Yes, Airbnb sold cereal before they were a 31 billion dollar company, and Slack was one hell of a pivot, but those wells have been over-drilled for their useful lessons at this point. This book is our honest, opinionated take on what we’ve learned building Intercom over the past 6 years. You won’t like it all, you won’t agree with it all, but you’re not supposed to. Your mileage will vary.
122 pages, eBook and Hardcover
Published April 20, 2017
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429 people want to read
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December 19, 2017
the highlighted answers to the questions if you don't have time to read the book:
(remember that this is a book based on their experience so some of it might not be true or irrelevant to other than SaaS business.)
*What will you build?*
Build something you actually understand.
make sure you’re solving a real world problem (problem first, technology second). ask yourself: Does this new technology make it cheaper, faster or easier for our customers to make progress in their lives?
Customers aren’t paying for innovation. They’re paying for a great product experience
What is a good product:
* offers restricted choices and use single purpose screens to reduce your product to a single step.
* if there’s repeatable behavior in the product, it should require nothing more than a couple of taps.
* offer a simple way to do complex tasks.
* it doesn’t have a lot of data entry. The less it have the better it is.
* it conveys information without you looking directly at it.
* it benefit customers with no action required on their part.
And it’s not enough to just have a great product!
*How will you build it?*
Obsessively talking to customers and researching their problems, perceptions, wants and needs.
Finding the smallest thing we can build that we think will solve the problem.
Ship to learn (shipping is the beginning).
Many small steps are better than bigger launches.
Think about daily and weekly goals
Work moves faster face-to-face
The outcome matters much more than the plan
The MVP philosophy doesn’t mean ship crap product fast. Test a prototype with your target users before you ship
Make your roadmap decision based on three timeline: next 6 years, 6 month and 6 weeks.
*What will you charge?*
You should start charging your customers as early as you can, because it helps you discover the most important areas to focus on.
Put a price on it, and see what happens
The longer you wait to charge for your product, the more normalized the “free” part is.
If you have high value customers with complex sales process, you need a sales team and low value customers who are able to serve themselves, need investing more in marketing.
The key to selling your product is understanding the value it delivers to your customers and then positioning it correctly based on that (It’s about understanding why your customers buy your product).
Your customers aren’t just investing money into your product, but also time, data and effort to learn something new (when customers say your product is too expensive they’re not necessarily talking about your price.)
Feedback from non-paying users tend to focus on additions to the product and from paying customers, on improvements to it.
Charge more than you’re comfortable with.
Justify (or kill) your lowest price point.
Many of your costs are spread across all your customers, but some, such as Cost Per Acquisition and Cost To Serve are fixed regardless of the pricing plan.
Plan to change your prices and for that ask these questions:
are we delivering more value than we were two years ago?
are our new customers less price-sensitive than previous ones?
has our marketing improved?
*Who should you hire?*
You really have to like your first few hires so hire people who share your fundamental values.
After no market need (42%) and ran out of cash (29%), not the right team (23%) is the reason why startup fails.
The people that you hire are proprietary. They’re the one thing your competitors can’t copy so by hiring great people, you will motivate even more people to join.
Hiring desperately for your immediate circumstances can cause long-term damage.
must hire people who:
* Dream big and push themselves towards bigger achievement than you initially thought possible.
* Have a growth mindset.
* Are inspired by and learn from the success of others.
* Everyone wants to work with.
* Take care of the unglamorous or mundane quickly.
* Aren’t selfish with the hard problems. They know that others need challenges to grow.
* Are good teachers.
* Customer focused.
* Make sure they’re solving big valuable problems.
* Act like they’re spending their own money.
* Give everyone hope and courage.
* Encourage possibilites.
* Are leaders who try to solve complex problems not victims who blame others when they can’t.
* Push for and encourage innovation both in the product they’re building and in how they’re building it.
Be clear about your values with candidate and tell them what matters.
Who you hire as knowledge and skills depends the stage your company is at. At an early stage startup, you should hire generalists. As your team matures, start bringing in specialists.
Spend your time helping ambitious people grow.
*Do culture and values ,after?*
Codifying values really early son means you’re faking it.
You can’t buy - or fake - culture.
Real cultures built over time. They’re the result of action, reaction, and truth.
You can’t force culture, but you can give it the chance to flourish.
A company culture is people practicing the spoken and unspoken values of the company on consistent and deliberate basis.
happiness at work is about your mission, not your perks.
define your mission statement and Ask: “why does our company exist other than to make money?”
Have people observe the work of their teammates on a regular basis.
Create an environment where people are willing to collaborate.
*How will you find your first customer?*
Getting from zero to 100 is your challenge.
A pleased customer is our best advertisement.
You need to find meaningful traction
When you do your marketing and potential customers come to eat the product, remember that easy come, easy go.
You have to share the ideas at the core of your product as early as you can.
To have a future, create a tight feedback loop with early customers to understand what you need to build.
Word of mouth is probably the most powerful way of getting new customers.
When people think very different things about your product, it’s important to have great messaging. It helps people explain your product to other prospective customers.
Great messaging that encourages word of mouth is simple, compelling, specific, differentiated and defensible.
Make a list and define your customer and the sales strategy for them. For example for SaaS product, the list will be like companies of less than 10 employees, companies of 11-25 employees, companies of 26-75 employees)
*How should you think about competitors?*
Focus on the problem you’re solving; worrying about competitors can come later.
47% of first-movers (startups with new ideas) fail, compared with 8% of fast followers.
The cost of success is that people will copy you.
As first-movers:
* You’ll have the expert knowledge, analytics and customer feedback that nobody else has.
* Don’t release prototypes, explain how anything works or even broadcast customer feedback.
* secure exclusive partnership.
* kill primary distribution channels for your competitors.
* win patent.
* look up the early customers (with bribery and long-term contracts)
If you are first in your market, you alone bear the costs of creating the market.
Fast followers might be able to copy the “what” of your product but never the “why”.
Customers don’t wait around for you to innovate. Speed is important.
If a company or a product has significant users that means nothing better has come along since.
As fast followers you should beat them at their own game over time by using better technology, design, product, route to market, etc.
*What will you measure?*
Use data to build a case for why your company is going to be X times more valuable than it is today.
Data can introduce even more uncertainty into your business if not used correctly. That doesn’t mean you should ignore data . Data is only one lens on your business. What your users are saying is another perspective.
Just because data is objective, it doesn’t mean that it guides you to the right decision. Just because it’s precise, it’s not necessarily valuable.
Success of your company won’t be measured by the same metrics used by the big players in the market.
Not all customers are the same. All feedback is not equal. Make sure you’re collecting customer feedback from the right sources (ex. If you want to improve your on boarding, talk to this week’s sign-ups. If you want to understand the challenges in getting an entire team to switch to your app, talk to people who have just added their whole team)
The type of customer giving the feedback matters (ex. Customers who have been loyal the longest. Customers who only started using your product six month ago but use it heavily. Customers who pay significantly more than others)
The customer’s motivations when they tell their feedback matter
People are generally motivated to provide unsolicited feedback if they have an extreme experience (good or bad). Average experienced don’t do review.
The overall volume of feedback about a single issue relative to other issues matters.
When reviewing customer feedback, try to build a mechanism that alerts you to this very occasional but high stakes feedback (security issues for example)
Three fundamental metrics to understanding the overall health of a product:
intent to use
activation
engagement
Understand which metrics are most important for your business.
Know the difference between your gross churn and your net churn.
It is very important to calculate the following for your overall business:
CAC: Cost of acquiring a customer
LTV: Customer Lifetime Value
Contribution Margin: Revenue from customer minus variable costs associated with a customer
Payback period: the time it takes you to recover your CAC
Have all three financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow)
Great SaaS companies have healthy GP margins at 70% or above.
Calculate how much you are investing in R&D (Research and Development), S&M (Sales and Marketing), G&A (General and Administrative) per month.
Remember data tells a story of what happened in the past. And the highest rewards come from the biggest risks.
*How will you grow?*
Growth tactics can be a distraction if you focus on them before you’ve found product-market fit. The greatest products will always have some sort of natural growth early on.
You need to validate your product first then you can start a growth team.
A common mistake startups make in the early days is relying too much on quantitative data.
A startup with a few hundred users could take 12 weeks to get useful data.
Look for inspiration outside software industry. What happens before, during and after people buy a product?
There is no such thing as a growth playbook and anyone who is successful has found their own path.
Growth is the lifeblood of startups.
Focus on the right metrics.
Tricking your users in order to hit your metrics cause long term, if not permanent, damage.
If you choose a vanity metric, you set your entire company up to pursue one thing: growing that number at all costs. Instead of delivering real value for your users. Likely at a cost to the experience of the people actually using your product.
Everyone in a startup is, or should be, working on growth.
The difference between product teams and marketing teams at a startup is that one is focused on long term growth and the other is focused on immediately measurable growth.
Growth comes from high-effort, high-impact work.
To explain growth hacking tactics: you can eat snacks when you’re hungry and it helps, but if you only ever ate snacks you’d eventually die.
If you know something is better and it’s hard to implement, you don’t need to A/B test it.
To avoid the pitfalls of smaller, “snack” metrics, it’s important to pair every single metric with an appropriate counter metric: signups with activations, new paid customers with churn or new paid customers with total revenue.
Focus on any metric in isolation is incorrect.
Some impactful questions that will help you grow:
* are you describing your product in the same language and terms that perspective customers use to articulate their problems?
* when did you last signup for your product? Does anyone in your company own the signup flows?
* how to you teach customers about your product? Are you helping them solve their problems?
not related to spesific question
Don’t deploy a bunch of tactics because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do.
You can’t become good at something without the freedom to be bad at it first.
The default path for startups is toward failure.
When deciding whether you should do something, if you feel anything less than “absolutely! Hell yeah!” Then say “no”.
Practice random acts of workplace happiness
Hire positive people
Stop negative behavior
Celebrate success
Celebrate mistakes
A billion dollar company was never built from better button colors.
Drawing a roadmap and developing in time comes from these sources:
1. Things you believe in
2. New ideas you have
3. Features that help you scale
4. Qualitative feedback
5. Quantitative data
(remember that this is a book based on their experience so some of it might not be true or irrelevant to other than SaaS business.)
*What will you build?*
Build something you actually understand.
make sure you’re solving a real world problem (problem first, technology second). ask yourself: Does this new technology make it cheaper, faster or easier for our customers to make progress in their lives?
Customers aren’t paying for innovation. They’re paying for a great product experience
What is a good product:
* offers restricted choices and use single purpose screens to reduce your product to a single step.
* if there’s repeatable behavior in the product, it should require nothing more than a couple of taps.
* offer a simple way to do complex tasks.
* it doesn’t have a lot of data entry. The less it have the better it is.
* it conveys information without you looking directly at it.
* it benefit customers with no action required on their part.
And it’s not enough to just have a great product!
*How will you build it?*
Obsessively talking to customers and researching their problems, perceptions, wants and needs.
Finding the smallest thing we can build that we think will solve the problem.
Ship to learn (shipping is the beginning).
Many small steps are better than bigger launches.
Think about daily and weekly goals
Work moves faster face-to-face
The outcome matters much more than the plan
The MVP philosophy doesn’t mean ship crap product fast. Test a prototype with your target users before you ship
Make your roadmap decision based on three timeline: next 6 years, 6 month and 6 weeks.
*What will you charge?*
You should start charging your customers as early as you can, because it helps you discover the most important areas to focus on.
Put a price on it, and see what happens
The longer you wait to charge for your product, the more normalized the “free” part is.
If you have high value customers with complex sales process, you need a sales team and low value customers who are able to serve themselves, need investing more in marketing.
The key to selling your product is understanding the value it delivers to your customers and then positioning it correctly based on that (It’s about understanding why your customers buy your product).
Your customers aren’t just investing money into your product, but also time, data and effort to learn something new (when customers say your product is too expensive they’re not necessarily talking about your price.)
Feedback from non-paying users tend to focus on additions to the product and from paying customers, on improvements to it.
Charge more than you’re comfortable with.
Justify (or kill) your lowest price point.
Many of your costs are spread across all your customers, but some, such as Cost Per Acquisition and Cost To Serve are fixed regardless of the pricing plan.
Plan to change your prices and for that ask these questions:
are we delivering more value than we were two years ago?
are our new customers less price-sensitive than previous ones?
has our marketing improved?
*Who should you hire?*
You really have to like your first few hires so hire people who share your fundamental values.
After no market need (42%) and ran out of cash (29%), not the right team (23%) is the reason why startup fails.
The people that you hire are proprietary. They’re the one thing your competitors can’t copy so by hiring great people, you will motivate even more people to join.
Hiring desperately for your immediate circumstances can cause long-term damage.
must hire people who:
* Dream big and push themselves towards bigger achievement than you initially thought possible.
* Have a growth mindset.
* Are inspired by and learn from the success of others.
* Everyone wants to work with.
* Take care of the unglamorous or mundane quickly.
* Aren’t selfish with the hard problems. They know that others need challenges to grow.
* Are good teachers.
* Customer focused.
* Make sure they’re solving big valuable problems.
* Act like they’re spending their own money.
* Give everyone hope and courage.
* Encourage possibilites.
* Are leaders who try to solve complex problems not victims who blame others when they can’t.
* Push for and encourage innovation both in the product they’re building and in how they’re building it.
Be clear about your values with candidate and tell them what matters.
Who you hire as knowledge and skills depends the stage your company is at. At an early stage startup, you should hire generalists. As your team matures, start bringing in specialists.
Spend your time helping ambitious people grow.
*Do culture and values ,after?*
Codifying values really early son means you’re faking it.
You can’t buy - or fake - culture.
Real cultures built over time. They’re the result of action, reaction, and truth.
You can’t force culture, but you can give it the chance to flourish.
A company culture is people practicing the spoken and unspoken values of the company on consistent and deliberate basis.
happiness at work is about your mission, not your perks.
define your mission statement and Ask: “why does our company exist other than to make money?”
Have people observe the work of their teammates on a regular basis.
Create an environment where people are willing to collaborate.
*How will you find your first customer?*
Getting from zero to 100 is your challenge.
A pleased customer is our best advertisement.
You need to find meaningful traction
When you do your marketing and potential customers come to eat the product, remember that easy come, easy go.
You have to share the ideas at the core of your product as early as you can.
To have a future, create a tight feedback loop with early customers to understand what you need to build.
Word of mouth is probably the most powerful way of getting new customers.
When people think very different things about your product, it’s important to have great messaging. It helps people explain your product to other prospective customers.
Great messaging that encourages word of mouth is simple, compelling, specific, differentiated and defensible.
Make a list and define your customer and the sales strategy for them. For example for SaaS product, the list will be like companies of less than 10 employees, companies of 11-25 employees, companies of 26-75 employees)
*How should you think about competitors?*
Focus on the problem you’re solving; worrying about competitors can come later.
47% of first-movers (startups with new ideas) fail, compared with 8% of fast followers.
The cost of success is that people will copy you.
As first-movers:
* You’ll have the expert knowledge, analytics and customer feedback that nobody else has.
* Don’t release prototypes, explain how anything works or even broadcast customer feedback.
* secure exclusive partnership.
* kill primary distribution channels for your competitors.
* win patent.
* look up the early customers (with bribery and long-term contracts)
If you are first in your market, you alone bear the costs of creating the market.
Fast followers might be able to copy the “what” of your product but never the “why”.
Customers don’t wait around for you to innovate. Speed is important.
If a company or a product has significant users that means nothing better has come along since.
As fast followers you should beat them at their own game over time by using better technology, design, product, route to market, etc.
*What will you measure?*
Use data to build a case for why your company is going to be X times more valuable than it is today.
Data can introduce even more uncertainty into your business if not used correctly. That doesn’t mean you should ignore data . Data is only one lens on your business. What your users are saying is another perspective.
Just because data is objective, it doesn’t mean that it guides you to the right decision. Just because it’s precise, it’s not necessarily valuable.
Success of your company won’t be measured by the same metrics used by the big players in the market.
Not all customers are the same. All feedback is not equal. Make sure you’re collecting customer feedback from the right sources (ex. If you want to improve your on boarding, talk to this week’s sign-ups. If you want to understand the challenges in getting an entire team to switch to your app, talk to people who have just added their whole team)
The type of customer giving the feedback matters (ex. Customers who have been loyal the longest. Customers who only started using your product six month ago but use it heavily. Customers who pay significantly more than others)
The customer’s motivations when they tell their feedback matter
People are generally motivated to provide unsolicited feedback if they have an extreme experience (good or bad). Average experienced don’t do review.
The overall volume of feedback about a single issue relative to other issues matters.
When reviewing customer feedback, try to build a mechanism that alerts you to this very occasional but high stakes feedback (security issues for example)
Three fundamental metrics to understanding the overall health of a product:
intent to use
activation
engagement
Understand which metrics are most important for your business.
Know the difference between your gross churn and your net churn.
It is very important to calculate the following for your overall business:
CAC: Cost of acquiring a customer
LTV: Customer Lifetime Value
Contribution Margin: Revenue from customer minus variable costs associated with a customer
Payback period: the time it takes you to recover your CAC
Have all three financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow)
Great SaaS companies have healthy GP margins at 70% or above.
Calculate how much you are investing in R&D (Research and Development), S&M (Sales and Marketing), G&A (General and Administrative) per month.
Remember data tells a story of what happened in the past. And the highest rewards come from the biggest risks.
*How will you grow?*
Growth tactics can be a distraction if you focus on them before you’ve found product-market fit. The greatest products will always have some sort of natural growth early on.
You need to validate your product first then you can start a growth team.
A common mistake startups make in the early days is relying too much on quantitative data.
A startup with a few hundred users could take 12 weeks to get useful data.
Look for inspiration outside software industry. What happens before, during and after people buy a product?
There is no such thing as a growth playbook and anyone who is successful has found their own path.
Growth is the lifeblood of startups.
Focus on the right metrics.
Tricking your users in order to hit your metrics cause long term, if not permanent, damage.
If you choose a vanity metric, you set your entire company up to pursue one thing: growing that number at all costs. Instead of delivering real value for your users. Likely at a cost to the experience of the people actually using your product.
Everyone in a startup is, or should be, working on growth.
The difference between product teams and marketing teams at a startup is that one is focused on long term growth and the other is focused on immediately measurable growth.
Growth comes from high-effort, high-impact work.
To explain growth hacking tactics: you can eat snacks when you’re hungry and it helps, but if you only ever ate snacks you’d eventually die.
If you know something is better and it’s hard to implement, you don’t need to A/B test it.
To avoid the pitfalls of smaller, “snack” metrics, it’s important to pair every single metric with an appropriate counter metric: signups with activations, new paid customers with churn or new paid customers with total revenue.
Focus on any metric in isolation is incorrect.
Some impactful questions that will help you grow:
* are you describing your product in the same language and terms that perspective customers use to articulate their problems?
* when did you last signup for your product? Does anyone in your company own the signup flows?
* how to you teach customers about your product? Are you helping them solve their problems?
not related to spesific question
Don’t deploy a bunch of tactics because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do.
You can’t become good at something without the freedom to be bad at it first.
The default path for startups is toward failure.
When deciding whether you should do something, if you feel anything less than “absolutely! Hell yeah!” Then say “no”.
Practice random acts of workplace happiness
Hire positive people
Stop negative behavior
Celebrate success
Celebrate mistakes
A billion dollar company was never built from better button colors.
Drawing a roadmap and developing in time comes from these sources:
1. Things you believe in
2. New ideas you have
3. Features that help you scale
4. Qualitative feedback
5. Quantitative data
June 2, 2017
The book every startup CEO *must* buy for each new hire. Required reading. I found myself taking notes throughout the entire book. You'll find scribbles every where. After building several products and now my second company, Intercom articulates so well and sheds light on the things you think you know about, but clearly didn't.
July 16, 2017
When your startup dream is blocked by a lot of complicated things, you should read this book.
It inspires you to learn how to answer big nine questions about building, pricing, measuring, and marketing a product yourself. Even more than so, it lets you realize that there is no secret recipe to success, you simply have to find your own path, and it's what makes start something up is so exciting. Isn't it?
It inspires you to learn how to answer big nine questions about building, pricing, measuring, and marketing a product yourself. Even more than so, it lets you realize that there is no secret recipe to success, you simply have to find your own path, and it's what makes start something up is so exciting. Isn't it?
May 12, 2017
As it says on the back: '...this book offers an opinionated perspective on how to build a startup from the ground up and the pitfalls you should avoid'. The conceited assertiveness gets a bit tiring after a while, yet as the book is a mere 121 pages, it is a fast read.
// Whilst not groundbreaking insights, worthwhile snippets (my bolding) that are useful reminders (at least to me):
- Chapter 1: PROBLEM FIRST, TECHNOLOGY SECOND
'Let’s start at the beginning. Before you make any further decisions, make sure you’re solving a real world problem. One of the biggest mistakes founders make when developing new products is focusing on the technology itself, rather than what it will enable.'
- Chapter 1: 'When considering what to build, most founders focus on what’s shiny and new, forgetting that great products can be created by tinkering and improving on existing ideas, or by making unglamorous changes that don’t require new technology.'
- Chapter 2: 'In order to grow and scale a product team, you need a set of values to help you make good decisions that align with what you collectively believe.'
- Chapter 3: 'Regardless of whether you’re selling a SaaS service or a physical good, you need to understand what it takes to attract your target customer and then decide what you want to charge them. That gives you the ability to plot how you’ll reach those customers, which gives you three options: transactional, enterprise and self-service.'
- Chapter 4: 'Exceptional people…habitually simplify. They don’t assume anything and strip big ideas back to their first principles. They know that greatness is achieved in 1,000 small steps. They also have a long term vision of where the technology they own should evolve to.'
- Chapter 6: 'Without clear messaging about what your product does, you leave room for people to make up their own mind and their own messaging. And that’s how you end up with five people all failing to describe an elephant, or in your case, try your product.'
// Whilst not groundbreaking insights, worthwhile snippets (my bolding) that are useful reminders (at least to me):
- Chapter 1: PROBLEM FIRST, TECHNOLOGY SECOND
'Let’s start at the beginning. Before you make any further decisions, make sure you’re solving a real world problem. One of the biggest mistakes founders make when developing new products is focusing on the technology itself, rather than what it will enable.'
- Chapter 1: 'When considering what to build, most founders focus on what’s shiny and new, forgetting that great products can be created by tinkering and improving on existing ideas, or by making unglamorous changes that don’t require new technology.'
- Chapter 2: 'In order to grow and scale a product team, you need a set of values to help you make good decisions that align with what you collectively believe.'
- Chapter 3: 'Regardless of whether you’re selling a SaaS service or a physical good, you need to understand what it takes to attract your target customer and then decide what you want to charge them. That gives you the ability to plot how you’ll reach those customers, which gives you three options: transactional, enterprise and self-service.'
- Chapter 4: 'Exceptional people…habitually simplify. They don’t assume anything and strip big ideas back to their first principles. They know that greatness is achieved in 1,000 small steps. They also have a long term vision of where the technology they own should evolve to.'
- Chapter 6: 'Without clear messaging about what your product does, you leave room for people to make up their own mind and their own messaging. And that’s how you end up with five people all failing to describe an elephant, or in your case, try your product.'
January 27, 2019
Well I didn't really know about this book's existence until a month back. I ordered it and it was an arduous process waiting for it but it was indeed worth it. This book is like the Holy Grail for technology startups. Every bit of information is realistic and has been tried out. It does not have any hypothesis. I mean I wish I had read this book earlier when I was an entrepreneur myself. Most of what the Intercom team talks about are things that helped them grow exponentially. They discuss general industry topics around product, tech, customer acquisition, hiring, culture and growth and talk about what they did to build a state of the art system in each of these. They also share important anecdotal stories about customer empathy and how you could leverage it to build your first 100 users. It is a must read for any tech entrepreneur or a product manager.
June 29, 2021
Den her var ganske rælete. Forfatterne (som introduserte seg selv med hel tittel hver eneste gang de skrev noe) dreiv for det meste å sitere seg selv eller sine ansatte, grafikken var helt på tryne (en graf uten x- og y-verdier hvor "bedrifter med god kultur" stiger, og "bedrifter med dårlig kultur" synker). En av de dårligere businessbøkene jeg har lest. Jeg vil på en måte gi plusspoeng for grafikken, men tidvis var kontrasten mellom teksten og bakgrunnen så lav at jeg skjønner ikke hvordan det har blitt godtatt. Jaja, ikke noe for meg.
August 8, 2017
I enjoyed the honest tone of this book and down-to-earth focus of the insights:
-Focus on customer feedback & jtbd until you have a product/market fit
-Gather customer feedback from all sources & analyze it regularly
-Don't be afraid anything & then change it later
-Hire generalists with growth mindset
-Use analytics to help with growth (but not as a holy grail)
-Focus on customer feedback & jtbd until you have a product/market fit
-Gather customer feedback from all sources & analyze it regularly
-Don't be afraid anything & then change it later
-Hire generalists with growth mindset
-Use analytics to help with growth (but not as a holy grail)
September 18, 2018
Sometime you should do what you know you need to do, even if the data doesn’t say so.
Read this slim book in a single sitting. Find an hour and read this book. Intercom has built an impressive product and company over the past few years and the founders know it. Really appreciate their pithy, useful advice that at times diverges from the standard refrains.
Read this slim book in a single sitting. Find an hour and read this book. Intercom has built an impressive product and company over the past few years and the founders know it. Really appreciate their pithy, useful advice that at times diverges from the standard refrains.
January 16, 2023
I really enjoyed reading the book. They used a lean and clen approach to tell their story. “Iterate newly shipped products” and “shipoing is about learning” are some key points that I especially loved. The only problem is brand colors used in the book, some pages are written in pink and it killed my eyes.
December 15, 2024
I own a marketing agency, with many software clients.
This book, is a short fun, inspiring read. Quite honestly worth the read for a little inspiration or motivation.
This is not a how-to guide, but of all the books on business I have read, this one I looked forward to picking up again at the end of the day!
This book, is a short fun, inspiring read. Quite honestly worth the read for a little inspiration or motivation.
This is not a how-to guide, but of all the books on business I have read, this one I looked forward to picking up again at the end of the day!
July 4, 2017
Even though I'm not a founder (yet), this book really shed light on aspects of growing a startup that, as a designer, I should constantly be thinking about. I highly recommend this book as an insight into how to grow your company and as a guidebook for when you set out on your own venture.
July 20, 2017
Great read to wrap your head around the foundation of building a product. Even if you've created or worked in small companies before, there's a ton of insights and tips throughout the book. Plus it's a shorter read, so you can get through it pretty quick.
December 3, 2017
This book is full of really good annecdotes and insights on how to run your startup is great if you work at a SAAS company as it talks about content strategy, brand positioning the importance of keep re-inventing yourself and never staying still.
May 18, 2021
I imagine creating a startup company would be incredibly challenging and exhausting and this book appears to pare down to the essentials of what to focus on and not focus on during that journey to growing a customer base and (hopefully!) leading to success.
September 2, 2021
Just the very best practices in product thinking and sane growth strategies for a lean startup summarized in a neat and concise package. It's best to consume this work with an open mindset to extract most of it.
May 16, 2017
Some great learnings from the first 6 years of building Intercom. Nothing ground breaking, but short and practical tips. Highly recommended for startup founders.
May 20, 2018
Des Traynor is the most influential product person in the world of SaaS
June 23, 2020
Good book for beginners, for the rest will be not very interesting
September 24, 2018
An easy read on how to build a software product, charge for it, team building, and how to grow. It's practical and touches on some good but common lessons from the industry.
April 29, 2017
A good fast guide to running a startup, but I hazard the content is better obtained from other books. (Re-work, Zero to One, The Lean Startup)
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